Ever since the news on Tuesday that Hunter Biden had reached an agreement with the government to plead guilty to charges but not receive jail time, much of conservative media members and politicians have reacted by decrying the unfairness of it all. There are accusations of a “two-tiered system of justice” that favors Democrats, with former President Donald Trump decrying Hunter’s punishment to that of a “traffic ticket.”
A Pat on the Wrist
This case was also made by columnist Michael Goodwin in the New York Post, a newspaper that can best be described as all Hunter Biden, all the time. “Hunter Biden’s plea deal is proof Democrats are ‘The Untouchables’ in Joe’s America,” the headline reads.
“Santa Claus is more real than the integrity of the FBI and Justice Department under Joe Biden. Friend and family discounts have never been so obvious — and odious,” Goodwin writes. “Those requirements are absent when the guilty son of the sitting president gets the equivalent of jaywalking citations for a life lived notoriously outside the law and the leader of the opposition party gets buried in a felony landslide. You don’t have to be a cynic to realize the larger consequences. This is what happens in Third World countries, and now it’s happening in America.”
Left out of Goodwin’s analysis is that Donald Trump is accused of debatably much worse crimes than Hunter Biden. And it’s far from rare for Democrats to be tried and convicted of crimes, or to resign from office in disgrace.
All of the conspiracy theories hinge on one thing: That the president, or someone close to him, must have leaned on U.S. Attorney David Weiss in connection to the case, and that Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor, is lying when he claims the decision was his alone. There’s no evidence that any of that is true.
Is the System Tiered?
The calls that the country has a “two-tiered system of justice” for the two parties are nonsense, especially when one considers, as reported by ProPublica in 2017, that Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump were nearly charged with a crime before the Manhattan DA overruled them. Or the recent Washington Post report about the Justice Department resisting opening a probe into former President Trump’s conduct on January 6.
For Democratic politicians to be charged with crimes is far from rare. Two of them — former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick — had their sentences commuted by, of all people, former President Trump, after they had served in prison for years.
On MSNBC Tuesday night, host Chris Hayes offered a compelling argument about the younger Biden: That the political right has expressed “sheer sadism” in his misfortune.
“I think today’s result of the long long investigation into Hunter Biden is ultimately good for the rule of law and for justice, even though I think honestly, they probably went out of their way to charge him,” Hayes said on the show. “But no one — no one — should lose sight of what this was all about. The sheer sadism of an attempt to wield a son’s addiction against the father for political purposes. That’s what has animated this entire enterprise from the beginning.”
Hayes went on to criticize conservative media for their mean-spirited coverage of the president’s son.
“If you watch right-wing media, I don’t know how much you do it, they are obsessed with Hunter Biden, just sort of engaged in a kind of ritual humiliation of him, a mainstay of their programming, and it is all frankly and clearly an attempt to wage a sort of psychological warfare upon the president,” Hayes said.
When observing that Goodwin’s paper, The New York Post, illustrated its story about the charges with nude photos taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop, it’s hard to argue with that.
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
